Belle knew, of course, that they were coming; and Garlock knew that Belle's hackles were very much on the rise. She could not read him, except very superficially, but she was reading the strange girl like a book and was not liking anything she read. Wherefore, when Garlock and his joyous companion reached the great spaceship—
"How come you picked up that little man-eating shark?" she sent, venomously, on a tight band.
"It wasn't a case of picking her up." Garlock grinned. "I haven't been able to find any urbane way of scraping her off. First Contact, you know."
"She wants altogether too much Contact for a First—I'll scrape her off, even if she is one of the nobler class on this world...." Belle changed her tactics even before Garlock began his reprimand. "I shouldn't have said that, Clee, of course." She laughed lightly. "It was just the shock; there wasn't anything in any of my First Contact tapes covering what to do about beautiful and enticing girls who try to seduce our men. She doesn't know, though, of course, that she's supposed to be a bug-eyed monster and not human at all. Won't Xenology be in for a rough ride when we check in? Wow!"
"You can play that in spades, sister." And for the rest of the day Belle played flawlessly the role of perfect hostess.
It was full dark before the Hodellians could be persuaded to leave the Pleiades and the locks were closed.
"I have refused one hundred seventy-eight invitations," Lola reported then. "All of us, individually and collectively, have been invited to eat everything, everywhere in town. To see shows in a dozen different theaters and eighteen night spots. To dance all night in twenty-one different places, ranging from dives to strictly soup-and-fish. I was nice about it, of course—just begged off because we were dead from our belts both ways from our long, hard trip. My thought, of course, is that we'd better eat our own food and take it slowly at first. Check, Clee?"
"On the beam, dead center. And you weren't lying much, either. I feel as though I'd done a day's work. After supper there's a thing I've got to discuss with all three of you."
Supper was soon over. Then: